THE RECOIL FROM ROMANTICISM 242(a verse drama published in New York in 1954), do not show many signs of
the poet Khal was to become a few years later.^56 In America Khal came to
know the poetry of Pound and Eliot and younger poets of the English-
speaking world. In fact later — in 1958 — he published an anthology of his
translations from poets ranging from Emerson, Longfellow, Poe, Thoreau and
Whitman to Emily Dickinson, Hilde Doolittle, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cum-
mings, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, John Crow Ransom,
Auden and Robert Lowell among others, as well as a translation of The
Waste Land (done jointly with Adunis in 1958) and a selection of Robert
Frost (in 1962). It was partly his readings in modern English and American
poetry that turned Khal away from the rarefied atmosphere of 'Aql's cold
craftsmanship. Khal published at least two volumes of verse in the new
style: The Forsaken Well (1958) and Poems at the Age of Forty {I960). There is
also his Selected Poems, selected and introduced by Adunis (1965 [? ]), which
contains some of the poems not included in the two ea'rlier volumes.
In the first poem in The Forsaken Well, To Ezra Pound' (p. 9), two things at
once become clear: first, Khal's poetic ideal, derived from the work of
contemporary English poets, and secondly, the conception that the poet is a
Christ-like figure, who not only brings life, but also has to make the ultimate
sacrifice towards that end, namely crucifixion. The conception is further
enforced in the second poem, entitled 'The Poet':
Crucified, I bleed while my hands touch the heavens
But tomorrow I rise from my grave... (pp. 11—13)The Christian image is not merely a myth whose primary function is to orga-
nize Khal's poems; like Taufiq Sayigh's impressive 'free verse' Khal's poetry
is in many ways religious and specifically Christian poetry: in a recent inter-
view fully reported in Mawaqif (June 1971), he explicitly and proudly asserted
his Christianity, and Adunis once described his poetry as 'the first Christian
experience in the purely metaphysical sense in Arabic poetry'.^57 Furthermore,
like other contemporary Arab poets what occupies his mind is not simply the
question of breathing life into what seemed to him to be stagnant and dead
poetry. Poetry is only one of many symptoms of what appears to be a dying
culture, and Khal is concerned with the whole Arab culture and society. He
opens a poem by asking:
Will the morning arise or will the end of day
Die with us? Our faces are deserts
Trampled over by barrenness, (p. 20)In 'The Loss' (pp. 22—4) he writes ironically about the prevalent attitude in
his society of seeking refuge and comfort in the distant past instead of facing